The present invention relates to personalized sound systems, including an ear-level device adapted to be worn on the ear, and the use of such systems to select hearing profiles to be applied using the sound system.
Ear-level devices, including headphones, earphones, head sets, hearing aids and the like, are adapted to be worn at the ear of a user and provide personal sound processing. U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/569,449, entitled Personal Sound System Including Multi-Mode Ear-level Module with Priority Logic, published as U.S. Patent Application Publication No. US-2007-0255435-A1 is incorporated by reference as if fully set forth herein. In US-2007-0255435-A1, a multi-mode ear-level device is described in which configuration of the ear-level device and call processing functions for a companion mobile phone are described in detail.
It is widely understood that hearing levels vary widely among individuals, and it is also known that signal processing techniques can condition audio content to fit an individual's hearing response. Individual hearing ability varies across a number of variables, including thresholds of hearing, or hearing sensitivity (differences in hearing based on the pitch, or frequency, of the sound), dynamic response (differences in hearing based on the loudness of the sound, or relative loudness of closely paired sounds), and psychoacoustical factors such as the nature of and context of the sound. Actual injury or impairment, physical or mental, can also affect hearing in a number of ways. A widely used gauge of hearing ability is a profile showing relative hearing sensitivity as a function of frequency.
The most widespread employment of individual hearing profiles is in the hearing aid field, where some degree of hearing impairment makes intervention a necessity. This entails detailed testing in an audiologist or otologist office, employing sophisticated equipment and highly trained technicians. The result is an individually-tailored hearing aid, utilizing multiband compression to deliver audio content exactly matched to the user's hearing response. However, this process is typically expensive, time-consuming and cumbersome, and it plainly is not suitable for mass personalization efforts.
The rise of the Internet has offered the possibility for the development of personalization techniques that flow from on-line testing. Efforts in that direction have sought to generate user hearing profiles by presenting the user with a questionnaire, often running to 20 questions or more, and using the user input to build a hearing profile. Such tests have encountered problems in two areas, however. First, user input to such questionnaires has proved unreliable. Asked about their age alone, without asking for personal information, for example, users tend to be less than completely truthful. To the extent such tests can be psychologically constructed to filter out such bias, the test becomes complex and cumbersome, so that users simply do not finish the test.
Another testing regime is set out in U.S. Pat. No. 6,840,908, entitled System and Method for Remotely Administered, Interactive Hearing Tests, issued to Edwards and others on 11 Jan. 2005, and owned by the assignee of the present application. That patent presents a number of techniques for such testing, most particularly a technique called N-Alternative Forced Choice, in which a user is offered a number of audio choices among which to select one that sounds best to her. Also known as sound flavors, based on the notion of presenting sound and asking the user which one is preferred; this method can lack sufficient detail to enable the analyst to build a profile.
Although different forms of test procedures for generating a personalized hearing profile have been employed by the art, none has been deployed in a way to produce accurate results for a large number of consumers.